Ever dream of holding your very own hardcover book in your hands? Smelling the ink on those freshly printed pages? Autographing the title page in that fancy, schmancy signature you’ve doodled over and over again since you were seven years old?
That was I—dreaming of the writing life as a kid (like I knew what the heck that entailed) as I smelled the books in our home library while I sifted through countless pages, pouring over the images in our 29 gold, embossed, maroon leather 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica’s (the Eleventh Edition). These babies were/are printed on onionskin pages, and I still smell them now, in my own home library across from my office where I’m currently sitting. They make me smile, reminding me of home and family and late-night, middle-school homework jags. The pages are as thin as you can imagine, and the detail in their hand-drawn photos lured me in like a Harry Potter movie does today. It’s not like I could look up the detail of an ancient Greek chariot or a blueprint of a 17th-century castle on the Internet in those days. But I could get ALL of that and more in my Britannica’s.
Oh sheesh, I digress…
When it actually happened—the autographing of my first book, that is—I thought I’d lose consciousness. It’s nothing short of a total kick in the psyche to see a childhood dream manifest in black and white in the palm of your hands!
But before holding our books can become a reality, as we’ve discussed before, we’ve got to write them. And, then figure out how and where to publish them. Which brings me to the state of publishing these days. Reams have been written on the topic in blogs and articles worldwide, but in case you’ve been a little busy trying to steal moments to actually write much less read, let’s take a minute and look at e-books vs. hardcover publishing.
I recently read in the NYT that Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest bookstores, reported earlier this year that sales of electronic books for Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, trumped sales of hardcovers for the first time. “Astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” Amazon’s chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos said in a statement.
Apparently, over the quarter, Amazon sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Even more shocking is that in June, Amazon reported sales increased to 180 for e-books for every 100 hardcover copies. Now, this is for Hardcover, not paperback, so we don’t have the stats there, but the NYT reports that paperback sales will still probably outnumber e-books. But for how long? (Especially with the release of the ipad!) We. Shall. See.
Why bring all this up? It’s something to seriously consider. If you plan on seeing your manuscript printed in hardcover with one of the few traditional publishers—Penguin Group, HarperCollins, Random House, Scholastic, or Simon & Schuster, there seems to be a diminishing window, and prices will most likely increase dramatically. But I’m all about abundance, and there will always be multiple avenues for sharing your creativity with your peeps. While I encourage you to get your proposal done soon if your heart’s set on a hardbound copy of your work with one of the Big 5, the real point is to get your writing ready so that whether it appears in blog posts, an e-book, a mass market paperback, or a hardbound book, your wisdom will be sought out and relished, your good stuff recorded and shared into perpetuity.
After all, whether hardcover books become a thing of the past in two, twenty, or two hundred years, what will always remain, is the desire for a darn good story.
That’s today’s ramble. Tuesdays are becoming my favorite day. (Okay, other than the weekends, where I’m actually learning to sleep in for the first time in, oh, 20+ years!)
If you get a chance, check out our latest Huffpo appearance in today’s Huffington Post (on Tightening Your Text).
And, a big THANK YOU to Marci Shimoff—the world’s bestselling female author of ALL time—for her video testimonial for my work. Thanks, Mama Marci!!!
Blessings to you, and to your book(s)!
Linda
#grateful
